Apparently, having fun is a controversial subject. Or at least
it is when it comes to combining fun and work.

The other day, I was meeting with a few non-profit leaders, and
we got on to the interesting subject of employee burnout. The staff
at our respective organizations had all been working in similar
situations over the past year: they experienced pay freezes,
reductions in force, and increases in workload. One of my
colleagues wanted to know what all of us were doing to help prevent
our employees from burning out. One person offered up an exercise
that a specialist on work/life balance had done with her staff.
Another gave examples of the new groups her staff were forming to
crochet or play basketball together outside of work.

My response involved a 2-foot high hot pink beehive wig and
fuchsia tutu. No, I had not taken my staff to see a classical
ballet version of Hairspray. The tutu and the wig were part of a
costume – my costume — as a proud member of the pink team during
the highly spirited Color Wars our staff had just taken part in.
Colors Wars had involved staff being split into four teams (pink,
green, purple, and orange) competing for points during a spirit
week (which included hat day, mismatch day, crazy hair day, and
pajama day) and in other team-oriented games like board game
Olympics and a wild relay race. I knew our staff needed what Color
Wars gave them, but even I was surprised at how much.

Before I could even get into the office the day after I
announced the Color Wars teams, I received a text message from our
operations manager: the Colors Wars were in full force and had
taken on a life of their own. There were signs posted all over the
place and the orange and purple teams got creative with fruits and
veggies, putting googly eyes, Groucho Marks glasses, and a variety
of Mr. Potato Head parts on oranges, eggplants and purple onions to
represent their teams.

At this point in my story to my fellow non-profit leaders, one
of them stopped me. She wanted to know what the positive
business-related outcome was of allowing staff to “waste” time
creating Mr. Potato Head people out of eggplants. She told me that
she assumed that I had a way to measure that return on investment.
Here is where the combination of fun and work gets controversial. I
do not have a graph or a bar chart that shows that after I allowed
staff a few minutes out of a week to have fun together and make
characters out of produce that our productivity went up and that
our efficiency improved.

The truth is, I did not need a chart. All I had to do was
observe. I could see that before our Colors Wars games our staff
were reaching a breaking point: they were exhausted and they were
starting to snip at each other and make more negative assumptions,
which is always a sign that people have one foot on the side of
burnout. Seeing our employees laughing, getting creative, and
building an amazing level of team spirit was enough evidence for me
that the Color Wars had their intended effect. To have multiple
employees approach me after Color Wars and say “I needed that” was
added evidence that the return on investment was there, even if I
had no chart to prove it.

It is entirely possible that one of our customers could read
this column and question my use of fun. They could argue that the
10 minutes spent creating an eggplant person could have been used
to return a phone call or a handful of e-mails. They are right.

Our staff could have been responding to e-mails or making phone
calls, but on the other hand, they are not machines. Even the
world’s best athletes do not train 24 hours a day. If you let your
team’s engine run on empty for too long, it will eventually
completely fall apart. Stripping work of all fun is a short-term
productivity solution that leads to long-term failure. Fun and
laughter are part of what allows people to keep going even in
extremely difficult circumstances. People rarely bond over
spreadsheets. They bond over laughing together, and the return on
investment of that is priceless.

Jessica H. Lawrence is the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio
Council and a frequent consultant on Results-Only Work
Environments. She can be reached via
jessicahlawrence@gmail.com.

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